TH&B UNITED features 16 artist projects by 22 artists located on the second and third floors of The Cotton Factory at 270 Sherman Avenue North, a mixed-use industrial arts and heritage complex. Building on the success of previous projects TH&B (2008) and TH&B2 (2012), TH&B UNITED features sculpture, installation, audio, video and performative projects by emerging and established artists with ties to Hamilton, Toronto, Buffalo, and the Rust Belt region.

TH&B was the common name of the former Toronto, Hamilton & Buffalo railway (1895-1987) that crossed the Niagara Peninsula from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie. In 2008, Hamilton artists Simon Frank, Dave Hind, Ivan Jurakic and Tor Lukasik-Foss adopted the name as a moniker for their ongoing collaborative site-responsive installations and projects.

Presented as a complement to an exhibition of new and recent work by two artists, Svava Thordis Juliusson and Laura Marotta, who share a use of manufacture material-products in their respective studio practices. Both express a reductivism and idealism as a series of malleable inventions.

The exhibition is on view at McMaster Museum of Art, 15 May -- 16 August 2014. www.mcmaster.ca/museum

Hamilton-based artists Svava Thordis Juliusson and Laura Marotta share a use of manufactured material-products in their respective studio practices. These offer solutions to conceptual issues—the making and the knowing—through a re-disciplining of handwork and repurposing. Marotta's geometrical structural works invoke visionary architecture and engineering. Juliusson uses her chosen materials for spatial drawing, both outward and bundled as objects. Both express a reductivism and idealism as a series of malleable inventions.

Juliusson would like to thank the Canada Council and both artists would like to thank the Ontario Arts Council for their generous support.